The Perils of Using Game Avatars Instead of Photos To Make Covers When You Are An Indie Author

 Cover for the Smashwords version of "Louisiana Slay Ride"

Cover for the Amazon version of "Louisiana Slay Ride"

Raw art file of Second Life avatar for "Louisiana Slay Ride"

I like the cover art I got for “Louisiana Slay Ride" but getting there wasn’t easy. The big problem was the left leg, particularly the knee, though censorship issues posed their usual problems.

As you can see on the raw art file, the entire left leg is off. Compare it to the right leg, which is smooth and nicely modeled, connecting nicely to the hip, the left leg is very nearly two dimensional. The seam between the left thigh and the left calf is almost invisible and ends way too soon. (I double checked by looking at photos of kneeling models, the seam was always clearly visible.)

Even worse is the knee. The knee is a tricky thing to accurately represent. But that dark blob where the kneecap should be looks nothing like a knee should. And that bright Y-shaped highlight is in the wrong place and looks off.

It’s a problem with Second Life avatars, joints like the shoulders, elbows and knees tend to render unrealistically. But the whole left leg going out is a mystery. If you look at pretty much the same avatar used for the cover of “I, The Glider Gun” which is taken from straight-on, you’ll see that both legs are nicely modeled.

Why does the left leg go two dimensional in a ¾ view? No idea. But I had to deal with that stupid knee. So I created a new layer in GIMP and put a white area matching the dark area of the knee. And I copied skin tone from the left thigh and put it on another layer. Then I used the white layer to lighten the dark knee blob, playing with the opacity until I had it lightened to roughly the same value as the inner thigh. Finally, I made the inner thigh skin sample visible and played with its opacity until the dark blobby knee area looked like the inner thigh skin, only a little lighter.

The idea was to capture the underlying kneecap shape with the skin tones where they should be. But what I wound up was mostly flat skin tones like the inner thigh. So I did the artistic thing and covered up the damn knee with my byline. Now that’s artistry!

A decent artist could have solved the problem in five or ten minutes, I’m sure. Took me two hours to come up with my half-assed solution.

The censorship needed for the breasts on the Amazon cover was also an issue. I could have just had the avatar wear a bra. But nooooo, I decided that since the pasties I was using for the Smashwords cover were white, I could create a white bra layer and lay it on over the avatar’s breasts. Pasties hide the nipples, bra obscures the breasts, boob’s yer uncle. And since you can get a white overlay looking three dimensional by playing with the opacity of the white layer, and bras are easy to create by using portions of circles as your templates, it can be a quick, easy task.

But the pasties proved to be a bit time-consuming, because if the bra covered the pasties or the chain between them it would look wrong. So after I created the bra outline I had to go into the bra layer and carefully erase those portions of the bra that covered the pasties and chain. I also had to erase those portions of the bra that covered the curls of the avatars hair that would have covered her bra strap. It didn't require any artistic skill, but it was time consuming, painstaking work.

All that work with the knee and the bra on top of posing the avatar, finding the background art, obtaining and creating the chain art in Second Life, and doing some other little stuff like enlarging the size of the avatar’s thong cup to keep the censors happy, the job was time consuming.

So it took about a day and a half to come up with both cover versions. Maybe two days. OK, two days. I was happy with the cover art, and I enjoyed making it, but damn. The images based on photos are a lot easier. But it’s much harder to get a clip art photo posed properly and to make the photo as naked and bondage-y as I can get away with.

Just part of the fun of being an indie author, I guess.

The Temple of the Collar

People who have done kinky RP on Second Life will recognize the term “Temple of the Collar.” Second Life is a virtual reality game, virtually all of whose objects and programming and  A group of Second Life builders got together and created collars and other bondage toys that share common Open Source scripts that allows people to cheaply and easily share their skills and toys for kinky RP, chief among which would be collars. Designers created all kinds of designs for collars, scripters created all kinds of scripts for collars and as a result they were able to offer them cheaply, and in some cases for free, to Second Life Rpers, making kinky RP a lot more user-friendly if you know what I mean, wink-wink nudge-nudge.

I didn't need the objects and scripts for Collar World, but I did borrow the name and the sense of generosity and inclusion for the Temple of the Collar. On Collar World, the Temple of the Collar serves as a social safety valve for those whose collars do not rest comfortably on their necks.

Some people will be misfits and will have a hard time in a relationship and feel the need to run away or “break a collar” which is the term for ending a personal collar relationship. At the Temple of the Collar, slaves without collars can get food, a place to sleep, safety and counseling, even a new collar of they want one. The Temple of the Collar collar allows a slave to recover until they want a new collar. Some slaves even take on a Temple collar permanently, finding it very comfortable.

The Temple shows up prominently in two of my stories, Collar Dread about a slavegirl who is fearful of the psychological changes created by collaring, and “The Visitor From Incel World” about a woman from Earth transported to Collar World by a physics experiment gone awry (which is still in editing).

Oh, did I mention the psychological aspects of collaring? Well, I did go into a lot of science fiction thinking there, too. Yet another blog post coming on that one.

Getting Inspired The Fun Way

I never know where the inspiration for an erotic short will come from. But often, it's an evocative photo that pushes it well beyond just an image of a specific person, place or event.  It's a photo that somehow implies relationships between the people pictured, or a world beyond the scene pictured.

Many porn images and in particular kinky porn images do that to some extent or another, evoking another, sexier world than most of us live in. Here are a couple of examples. (Note: the images I am linking to are NSFW images that contain naked women. Do not click on them if such images offend you. I would say they are on the arty end of the scale rather than the porny end -- no sex acts are portrayed -- but whether or not you click on them is your choice.):

Inspiration 1 -- Warning NSFW

“She crouched on the bed, legs spread wide, naked, alert to the least signal from the one who held her leash. How odd that her gender studies degree from Bryn Mawr had led her exactly, precisely, to this moment, this situation. She was furious and ashamed that she was in this situation, but she couldn't stop it, couldn't say the safeword that would end it.”

It's mostly the expression on the woman's face that does it here. She has a wry, rueful expression, as if she is thinkng about how she got in that situation. So my mind easily generates a story about how it happened. Might be a good story idea, might not, but definitely worth considering.

Inspiration 2 -- Warning NSFW

This is a photo that has a great story in it. I don't know where it came from or who took it, but it's wonderful work. It shows two women, one standing, one kneeling. The standing woman is wearing a dress that goes down to her ankles. She's standing next to a trellis of some sort, hanging onto it with one hand as if for balance. One leg is slightly extended and she's wearing ballet slippers. Her foot is raised and resting on the tip of her toes, in the position ballet dancers call "en pointe." She's looking off to her left, outside the frame of the image. Her hair is swept up, her expression is calculating and thoughtful, perhaps a bit of lust or avarice in there, too -- some kind of desire, in any event. And definitely some apprehension, too.

Behind her some tree limbs partially obscure some lighted orange globes, along with some geometrical webbing of some sort. In front of one of the globes four butterflies are suspended in the air, wings fully extended, looking kind of artificial.

It's all very proper, the sort of thing that could hang in a ballet school hallway without raising an eyebrow -- except for the other woman, of course. She is stark naked except for a large string of beads around her neck. She kneels to the standing woman's right, and she's looking off to the left as well, probably at the same thing the standing woman is looking at. Her expression is a welcoming smile. And she's holding her hands behind her back as if bound, which in conjunction with the kneeling emphasizes her large breasts even more.

Furthermore, she has nice curvy hips and a nice round butt which is emphasized by the way her butt sticks out as she kneels, undoubtedly more than it needs to.

What are these two looking at? We don't know, but we can guess, and what we'd guess is, a man. A man they both find intriguing and attractive. And their bodies both express their attraction in different ways. The standing woman is calculating, apprehensive, yet that en pointe foot suggests she's ready to pivot to her left at any moment. Or to the right.

The kneeling woman is much more open in her response, the welcoming smile and outthrust butt say it all. She wants a piece of whatever or whoever she's looking at to the left, and she wants that piece inside her body.

Also of considerable interest is the relationship between the two women. Their physical closeness implies personal closeness as well. Mistress and slavegirl might be a good guess. Friends whose lives have diverged greatly, but who remain friends is another one. Also, they might both be one and the same woman, the kneeling woman a visual expression of her libido as she looks at the man, the standing woman an expression of her conscious mind with its calculation.

There are other interesting questions, too. Like, the background suggests a party of some sort. But at what sort of party do you bring a naked slavegirl? (Answer: a FUN party!) Or maybe it's a theatrical production and they're onstage. What sort of production? Well, one that involves nudity, that's for sure. Rules a lot of stuff right out, though as I recall the BBC did some nekkid Shakespeare.

There's also something a little racial going on. The kneeling woman has broad cheeks and a snub nose, she doesn't look all that Caucasian. The standing woman looks very Caucasian. Is this supposed to be the American South slavery, stylized? Or is it Slavery involving the Middle East or Asia? It's hard to say, once again, there's nothing that really spells it out for me.

I found this piece of artwork on the virtual wall of a virtual tavern in Second Life Gor, years ago. I have no idea where it originates. I did some research but it came up blank. There is a name underneath the image, ANGELa Blank, and there is a German photographer named Angela Blank, but I can't link the two.

There may be a prosaic answer to these questions, I don't know. But I do know that answering the questions leads to some interesting story ideas. What do you think? I'm not sure which story I want to write, if any. Could I write a story worthy of this image? I'm not sure.

Might be fun to try, though.

(I found this piece of artwork on the virtual wall of a virtual tavern in Second Life Gor, years ago. I have no idea where it originates. I did some research but it came up blank. There is a name underneath the image, ANGELa Blank, and there is a German photographer named Angela Blank, but I can't link the two. Doesn't matter – the mystery only makes the image more intriguing.)

Sex Slavery Fantasy Fuel: In Praise of John Norman

The difference between erotica and sexy non-erotica, I've discovered, is  this: erotica provides graphic descriptions of sex acts designed to get the reader off. Mainstream sexy fiction provides fantasy fuel only. No graphic descriptions of sex acts to get you off, but plenty of erotic events, briefly described and plenty of erotic situations that let the reader create their own graphic sexual fantasies, something we as yet don't have the technology to prevent, thank God.

And the person who did this better than ANYONE for the kink community is John Norman, whose Gor novels are, IMHO, works of genius, smoothly combining sex slavery fantasy fuel with science fantasy sword and sandal stories. He was the only one to see how smoothly and easily this could be done, and kind of still is, since nobody has really followed in his footsteps.

He clearly loved heroic fantasy and made solid heroic fantasy stories in his novels, but he also included sex slavery fantasy fuel like nobody else did, and that includes Filthy Philip Jose Farmer and Randy Andy Offutt!

(Norman does have a way of having his characters pause regularly to drone on and on and on about women's rightful place in natures as men's slaves, which has earned him a lot of enmity among feminists. My advice is, skip those parts when they start up, the books are much shorter and more fun to read without them. With them, they are almost unreadable. Makes all the difference in the world.)

When Norman's books debuted with Ballantine Books back in 1964, they were so heavily edited that no one really knew what he was up to. They got accepted as just the usual heroic fantasy Conan knock-offs, ho-hum. Norman got sick of this and moved to DAW books after publishing half a dozen or so books with Ballantine. Freed from the constraints of Ballantine Books, the books grew longer and more sex slavery fantasy fuel filled, and also a lot more popular. They're still going strong on Amazon with the most current book in the series being number 35, Quarry of Gor.

This was WAY before the explosion of erotic ebooks created kinky epics, it was before COMPUTERS, much less ebooks. It was practically prehistoric. Point is, Donald A. Wollheim, the head of DAW books, said that John Norman was outselling all is his other fantasy authors COMBINED sometime back in the 70s or 80s.

And there was a lot of evidence that Norman's readers were primarily female. It was really hard to get good numbers here, because of course, most books were being bought in bookstores, and the clerks had no incentive to keep track (though some DID report attempting to shame buyers of Gor novels).

Still, given what we know about the ebook market, it would make sense. Also, an insider at Linden Labs, the people who created the Second Life virtual world, where Gorean roleplay is and was a big thing, reported that about two thirds of Gorean roleplayers had female names on their credit cards.

So, there's that. And the reason I stress that so many Gor novel readers are female is to make the point that people who are trying to suppress books like the Gor novels and erotica in general are suppressing, not big nasty male proto-rapists, but women who like the submissive sex roleplay. (Some dom males like myself like them, too, but we're surprisingly sophisticated in our tastes, so there – neener-neener!)

Of the Gor novels, my favorite is Dancer of Gor. It is atypical, written from the POV of an Earth librarian captured by Goreans and trained to be a paga slut dancer. (Most Gor novels are written in omniscient POV, or first person, with a male protagonist.) It has a slave girl auction scene that is four chapters long and IMHO sets the standards for kinky slavegirl auction scenes, period. It also has a scene in which the protagonists' virginity is auctioned off by the paga tavern that owns her, to 17 lucky winners, who all get to fuck her that night while she's chained in an alcove and hooded so she can't see who fucks her first.

Fantasy fuel? You bet!